Given that a significant amount (enough to have a noticeable effect on prices) of our natural gas is coming from hydraulic fracturing (fracking) this will undoubtably affect the demand for NG produced by fracking. Given that so many questions are being raised about environmental and safety concerns about the process, is this a good idea?
First things first. You need to recognize that you don't have a technology problem. You have a people problem. Then you need to articulate this (tactfully, of course) as far and as wide as possible.
If you succeed at that, follow up on the other excellent technical ideas expressed here.
Google? Yeah, they clearly didn't have a clue what they're doing when they invented MapReduce.
Facetiousness aside, the highly structured storage with tables and columns that a Codd style relational database provides is a better fit for most problems than most of the key/value pair (KVP) databases out there. There is too much R&D invested in that technology to just ignore. Using KVP puts more work on the programmer to organize the data. Storing serialized tuples in JSON or XML or whatever is en vogue at the time isn't structured storage.
Map Reduce is a technique to "pre-cook" summary data. Google uses it's massive farm of computation nodes to precompute facts about their data. You can not effectively create a single Relational DB instance with a thousand machines - as least not without breaking more than a few well established conventions.
There is a test (ROC) used to evaluate sensitivity and specificity of a selection criteria. If you have 2000 known cohorts, use 1000 to train the algorithm and 1000 to validate the algorithm. Once tuned, use that algorithm to classify remaining candidates that match the cohort criteria (i.e.: women, age 20 to 40,... yada yada)
I suspect they're using the loyalty program mass mailing to send these. There are probably 100's of coupons in the packet. The packet probably already has language like, "just for you!" on it.
Except that it actually happened. I work in a biomedical informatics group and the same techniques we use to find features that can detect early infection in cells can be applied to marketing data. If you have enough training data, for example, start with 2000 known customers who started buying diapers and formula on a certain date. Now what did they start buying seven months before that? Now find the customers who match that profile. Data are data.
Sure, shared accounts. iTunes? How do you legally split an iTunes collection? My BluRay player has a Netflix widget that's tied to my account. My kids use it more than me. Sometimes data are too easy to copy. Consider data that one party DOESN'T want the other to have. What if this couple took digital photographs that were never published, but could be published later to humiliate the other. What about DRM data?
um... Visicalc was one of the first PC "Killer Apps" and it was character based. The first copy of MS Word I used was character based. WordPerfect was character based. The PC's I used at university didn't have graphics adapters capable of anything BUT character mode. The PC broke into the corporation long before Windows 1.0 was even released.
Exactly. IT organizations are tolerated in organizations because the company wants the benefits that information technology gives them. Businesses accept that there is a need for controls and policies to protect the organization from malicious use of technology and that these policies are a classic trade-off between risk and productivity value. Of course each organization has different tolerance for risk and different expectations for value. But at the end of the day, if an IT organization fails to deliver enough productivity benefits to offset the controls that diminish productivity and costs, the businesses will look elsewhere to find more productive technology.
This has happened before. The reason the PC is entrenched in the work place is because the big wigs who bought PC's for the home saw value in them and made their COBOL coding minions assimilate them into the workplace.
The Yellow Pages is a vital service that helps people who use telephones find the services they need. These types of laws allow the government to remove entries from the Yellow Pages without any due process just on the unproven suspicion of wrong doing. Furthermore, the big companies who buy full pages ads in the Yellow Pages often claim and insist that dozens of other listings ought to be removed because they're stealing their services. Since there have been enough examples of erroneous claims to service theft, there should be plenty of doubt the accuracy and motives of those big companies.
Some of us actually wrote our congressional representatives. I wrote a letter to mine two months ago. I have no idea if it helped, but lawmakers do talk to each other.
Actually, that's a perfect example of how it should be done. A copyright owner notifies the infringer of a violation. The infringer says, "Sorry, my bad, I didn't know. I'll address that immediately." The infringing material is removed. Both parties go on their merry way.
Because infringement is very easy to do unintentionally, as Representative Smith found out, I feel there needs to be a safe-harbor course of action. If infringement is removed within (picks a number from thin air) seven days, then the infringement should be presumed to be unintentional and not liable for any damages.
Furthermore, there should be a process where an alleged infringer can say to an accuser, "No, you've got it all wrong. I have a right to use this because of [insert reason here]." The matter would be settled either inside or outside of courts, using well-established procedures from Civil Law, but the matter would eventually be settled.
Anyway, that's my fantasy world. It's happy there. I only wish it could actually happen.
Film making isn't creative any more. The part of Hollywood with all the money doesn't gamble. Unless your name is Spielberg or Bay or some other A-list director, your film is subject to intense micromanagement. You film different endings. The "focus group" has the final say.
Both QNAP and Synology make good NAS units with multimedia capabilities. That said, if you need transcoding for video, don't count on either one having the horsepower to transcode video. They have enough power to saturate GigE for simple file sharing, but you'll need another device with more power to transcode video: (ie: convert a 720p mkv to an iPad friendly format) Out of the box, they're stripped down Linux boxes with Busybox based userland tools. But they have good community based support for extensions from Optware - you can add gcc compilers, perl, ruby and all kinds of goodies to hack your NAS into whatever frankenstein setup you like. The best part... they're low power consumption.
It's not always about money. It could also be blind party loyalty. GoDaddy has an strong track record of donating to republican candidates including Ted Stevens who was a long time friend of Big Media. It would not surprise me to find that leadership of GoDaddy doesn't understand the technical flaws of SOPA.
Except The US DoD. While they don't use PGP, they do use S/MIME email extensions.
It's a pain in the ass when they try sending attachments using Outlook to email readers that don't support decoding of "winmail.dat" payloads.
Crashes are a very different thing from wrong answers. Suppose for a moment he's working on a system to compute insurance premium values. It takes in a whole bunch of inputs to calculate the risk and then calculate a premium to cover the insurance companies liability. If the calculation runs completes normally, the crash detection system won't know it overpriced the premium.
I wrote my congressman urging him to oppose HR 3261. I got back a polite letter that gave no sense of how he will vote. But given that he's a staunch Republican in the district next door to Speaker Boehner's district, I doubt there are enough constituents who have expressed enough opinions to sway him from the Party Line.
Never the less, I got off my ass and DID SOMETHING! You should too.
https://fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/388571_10150409971002592_700082591_8990585_787157727_n.jpg
Exactly. This historical blog entry sums it up pretty nicely. http://blog.netflix.com/2008/11/encoding-for-streaming.html
In order to get the content from the content producers, I presume Netflix had to provide some sort of promise that the streams could not be ripped. Since Silverlight was born in the DRM era, I can only conclude that DRM was a design feature rather than a bolt on. And when the Netflix techies and lawyers got together, Silverlight gave them the most confidence in living up to the UnRippable promise. We on Slashdot will no doubt question the validity of those choices because this is Slashdot, but we were not in the room at the time.
I'm working on a multi-institution team doing biomedical research and one of the team members is using Gluster. It's 200TB of high resolution microscopy spread across six brick (aka: nodes) systems. I don't know if the vendor misconfigured it, but it is a complete pig of a system. It's slow. Painfully slow. We ended up copying active data to a small 12TB consumer NAS for analysis and leave the Gluster as the permanent archive.
Nope. It was an early VGA card on a PS/2 with Microchannel slots. 16 colors at high res (640x480) and 256 colors at low res (320x200) and the large 12" screen. I was styling!
Slashdot Mirror
If you don't demand laws that protect digital freedom, someone else will demand laws that says the bytes you buy aren't yours.
Given that a significant amount (enough to have a noticeable effect on prices) of our natural gas is coming from hydraulic fracturing (fracking) this will undoubtably affect the demand for NG produced by fracking. Given that so many questions are being raised about environmental and safety concerns about the process, is this a good idea?
First things first. You need to recognize that you don't have a technology problem. You have a people problem. Then you need to articulate this (tactfully, of course) as far and as wide as possible.
If you succeed at that, follow up on the other excellent technical ideas expressed here.
Google? Yeah, they clearly didn't have a clue what they're doing when they invented MapReduce.
Facetiousness aside, the highly structured storage with tables and columns that a Codd style relational database provides is a better fit for most problems than most of the key/value pair (KVP) databases out there. There is too much R&D invested in that technology to just ignore. Using KVP puts more work on the programmer to organize the data. Storing serialized tuples in JSON or XML or whatever is en vogue at the time isn't structured storage.
Map Reduce is a technique to "pre-cook" summary data. Google uses it's massive farm of computation nodes to precompute facts about their data. You can not effectively create a single Relational DB instance with a thousand machines - as least not without breaking more than a few well established conventions.
TL;DR - Use the right tool for the right problem.
There is a test (ROC) used to evaluate sensitivity and specificity of a selection criteria. If you have 2000 known cohorts, use 1000 to train the algorithm and 1000 to validate the algorithm. Once tuned, use that algorithm to classify remaining candidates that match the cohort criteria (i.e.: women, age 20 to 40, ... yada yada)
I suspect they're using the loyalty program mass mailing to send these. There are probably 100's of coupons in the packet. The packet probably already has language like, "just for you!" on it.
Except that it actually happened. I work in a biomedical informatics group and the same techniques we use to find features that can detect early infection in cells can be applied to marketing data. If you have enough training data, for example, start with 2000 known customers who started buying diapers and formula on a certain date. Now what did they start buying seven months before that? Now find the customers who match that profile. Data are data.
Sure, shared accounts. iTunes? How do you legally split an iTunes collection? My BluRay player has a Netflix widget that's tied to my account. My kids use it more than me. Sometimes data are too easy to copy. Consider data that one party DOESN'T want the other to have. What if this couple took digital photographs that were never published, but could be published later to humiliate the other. What about DRM data?
To say nothing of the electric bill.
um ... Visicalc was one of the first PC "Killer Apps" and it was character based. The first copy of MS Word I used was character based. WordPerfect was character based. The PC's I used at university didn't have graphics adapters capable of anything BUT character mode. The PC broke into the corporation long before Windows 1.0 was even released.
Exactly. IT organizations are tolerated in organizations because the company wants the benefits that information technology gives them. Businesses accept that there is a need for controls and policies to protect the organization from malicious use of technology and that these policies are a classic trade-off between risk and productivity value. Of course each organization has different tolerance for risk and different expectations for value. But at the end of the day, if an IT organization fails to deliver enough productivity benefits to offset the controls that diminish productivity and costs, the businesses will look elsewhere to find more productive technology.
This has happened before. The reason the PC is entrenched in the work place is because the big wigs who bought PC's for the home saw value in them and made their COBOL coding minions assimilate them into the workplace.
The Yellow Pages is a vital service that helps people who use telephones find the services they need. These types of laws allow the government to remove entries from the Yellow Pages without any due process just on the unproven suspicion of wrong doing. Furthermore, the big companies who buy full pages ads in the Yellow Pages often claim and insist that dozens of other listings ought to be removed because they're stealing their services. Since there have been enough examples of erroneous claims to service theft, there should be plenty of doubt the accuracy and motives of those big companies.
Then just step on it as you walk away.
Some of us actually wrote our congressional representatives. I wrote a letter to mine two months ago. I have no idea if it helped, but lawmakers do talk to each other.
Actually, that's a perfect example of how it should be done. A copyright owner notifies the infringer of a violation. The infringer says, "Sorry, my bad, I didn't know. I'll address that immediately." The infringing material is removed. Both parties go on their merry way.
Because infringement is very easy to do unintentionally, as Representative Smith found out, I feel there needs to be a safe-harbor course of action. If infringement is removed within (picks a number from thin air) seven days, then the infringement should be presumed to be unintentional and not liable for any damages. Furthermore, there should be a process where an alleged infringer can say to an accuser, "No, you've got it all wrong. I have a right to use this because of [insert reason here]." The matter would be settled either inside or outside of courts, using well-established procedures from Civil Law, but the matter would eventually be settled.
Anyway, that's my fantasy world. It's happy there. I only wish it could actually happen.
... in other news, 33% of British use Facebook. [I honestly have no idea, it does seem plausible]
Film making isn't creative any more. The part of Hollywood with all the money doesn't gamble. Unless your name is Spielberg or Bay or some other A-list director, your film is subject to intense micromanagement. You film different endings. The "focus group" has the final say.
Both QNAP and Synology make good NAS units with multimedia capabilities. That said, if you need transcoding for video, don't count on either one having the horsepower to transcode video. They have enough power to saturate GigE for simple file sharing, but you'll need another device with more power to transcode video: (ie: convert a 720p mkv to an iPad friendly format) Out of the box, they're stripped down Linux boxes with Busybox based userland tools. But they have good community based support for extensions from Optware - you can add gcc compilers, perl, ruby and all kinds of goodies to hack your NAS into whatever frankenstein setup you like. The best part ... they're low power consumption.
It's not always about money. It could also be blind party loyalty. GoDaddy has an strong track record of donating to republican candidates including Ted Stevens who was a long time friend of Big Media. It would not surprise me to find that leadership of GoDaddy doesn't understand the technical flaws of SOPA.
In the Kingdom of the Blind, the man with one eye is King.
Except The US DoD. While they don't use PGP, they do use S/MIME email extensions. It's a pain in the ass when they try sending attachments using Outlook to email readers that don't support decoding of "winmail.dat" payloads.
Crashes are a very different thing from wrong answers. Suppose for a moment he's working on a system to compute insurance premium values. It takes in a whole bunch of inputs to calculate the risk and then calculate a premium to cover the insurance companies liability. If the calculation runs completes normally, the crash detection system won't know it overpriced the premium.
I wrote my congressman urging him to oppose HR 3261. I got back a polite letter that gave no sense of how he will vote. But given that he's a staunch Republican in the district next door to Speaker Boehner's district, I doubt there are enough constituents who have expressed enough opinions to sway him from the Party Line.
Never the less, I got off my ass and DID SOMETHING! You should too.
https://fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/388571_10150409971002592_700082591_8990585_787157727_n.jpg
Exactly. This historical blog entry sums it up pretty nicely. http://blog.netflix.com/2008/11/encoding-for-streaming.html
In order to get the content from the content producers, I presume Netflix had to provide some sort of promise that the streams could not be ripped. Since Silverlight was born in the DRM era, I can only conclude that DRM was a design feature rather than a bolt on. And when the Netflix techies and lawyers got together, Silverlight gave them the most confidence in living up to the UnRippable promise. We on Slashdot will no doubt question the validity of those choices because this is Slashdot, but we were not in the room at the time.
I'm working on a multi-institution team doing biomedical research and one of the team members is using Gluster. It's 200TB of high resolution microscopy spread across six brick (aka: nodes) systems. I don't know if the vendor misconfigured it, but it is a complete pig of a system. It's slow. Painfully slow. We ended up copying active data to a small 12TB consumer NAS for analysis and leave the Gluster as the permanent archive.
Nope. It was an early VGA card on a PS/2 with Microchannel slots. 16 colors at high res (640x480) and 256 colors at low res (320x200) and the large 12" screen. I was styling!